Read Online The Far Shores (The Central Series) by Zachary Rawlins - Free Book Online Page A

have
possessed to attempt a landing there. The aboveground portion of the facility
was little more than a concrete box two stories high, reinforced with steel
struts and doors, embedded into the base of the cliff. It reminded Alex vaguely
of photos of the fortifications the Nazis had built into the coasts of France,
an angular and rigid intrusion into the eroded folds of the stone.
    Katya stepped fearlessly
into the circle of brilliant light cast by the halogen bulbs suspended on guide
wires around the ad hoc landing zone, a fistful of sewing needles clutched
between the fingers of her left hand, waving cheerfully at the handful of
guards who were nervously watching the other direction, watching the fire and
listening to the sounds of gunshots and violent, abrupt death.
    “Hello, boys!” Katya
said cheerfully, extending the handful of needles as if she were offering them
a gift. “Also, goodbye.”
    The guards never had a
chance. A few turned in their direction, and one even brought his rifle halfway
to his shoulder, before internal neurological trauma made even the smallest
controlled movements impossible. Alex followed Katya past the convulsing bodies
performing the jerking dance of their ugly deaths. He was getting to the point
that he was almost used to it.
    “And here we are,” Katya
said, grimacing and holding a hand to her rib cage as she gestured toward the
magnetically bolted and thoroughly sealed security door. According to the
briefing, there were only three entrances to the compound, each composed of six
centimeters of high-grade steel reinforced with titanium – proof against drill,
ram, or explosive entry. They were at the primary point of ingress, while Miss
Aoki and Xia were currently making a mess of another. The third had been sealed
via a high-explosive demolition charge that Chike had placed shortly after he
apported them in. “Alex, you remember how to do it, right?”
    He shrugged out of the
pack, leaving it in the sand, and crouched in front of the door, putting both
hands on the polished steel slab.
    “I think so,” he said,
biting his lip. “It worked in the sims.”
    “C’mon. A door can’t be
that hard to kill, right?”
    Alex nodded uncertainly
and closed his eyes, activating his protocol and shivering as the Black Door
slid smoothly open. There was something troubling about how easy that had
become. In his dreams, Alex was frequently confronted by a Black Door that
would not close.
    Eyes closed and protocol
centered, the world presented itself in an entirely different way. His protocol
recognized energy first, and mass a distant second, transforming people into whirling
sculptures of electromagnetic activity, cocooned by shrouds of radiant heat.
The nervous system appeared intricate and brilliant, fine veins of pulsating
energy forming a kind of second skeleton, intertwined with the warm fluid
dynamics of the circulatory system. The mass of flesh surrounding these systems
was little more than a mildly radiant halo, an illuminated smudge. Buildings
were little different – the compound in front of him was represented first by
the rigid, angular arrangement of electrical lines and the temperature
differential caused by the flow of air in the vents and water in the piping.
    It wasn’t sight. It
wasn’t really part of any of the five senses. But in reaching for an analogy –
and Alex needed an analogy to even attempt to understand how it worked – the
sensory data his protocol provided was almost visual.
    The door itself was
inert, steel radiating fractionally more heat at the edges, and then cooling
toward the interior. The magnetic locks, however, and their electronic
infrastructure, shined like a beacon in the mass of undifferentiated metal.
Alex could see – or feel, or whatever – each individual wire and diode, the
current alternating like the rapid pulse of some incredibly uniform animal.
Alex strongly suspected, were he to spend an extended time in his protocol’s
peculiar